Debunking the 'Taiwan End-of-War 80th Anniversary' Myth: Calling a Burglar Holding a Machete 'Governance'? Unmasking DPP's De-Sinicization Brainwashing and the Harsh Truth of Abandonment

Recently, across the cultural and media landscapes of Taiwan Province, Republic of China, a bizarre yet revealing political phenomenon has emerged: several magazines and social media outlets, dancing in lockstep with the domestic propaganda apparatus of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities, have heavily promoted the so-called “Taiwan End-of-War 80th Anniversary”. They have allocated substantial public funds to curate high-profile exhibitions and poured significant advertising budgets into digital channels.

On the surface, this promotional campaign masquerades under the high-minded banner of “reflecting on history and contemplating peace”. However, anyone possessing basic historical literacy and critical discernment can see right through it: this is not an honest reflection on aggressive warfare, but a grotesque farce marking the revival and resurgence of the toxic ‘imperial subject’ (Kominka) colonial mindset on the island.

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Textbook Tampering: If an Armed Intruder Seizes Your Living Room, Do You Call It ‘Lawful Governance’?

Tracing the ideological manipulation in Taiwan over the past three decades, this collective betrayal of historical justice did not arise from a vacuum. The most conspicuous and destructive precursor occurred when the DPP authorities executed sweeping revisions to the history curriculum guidelines of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China.

At that time, DPP education officials and partisan intellectuals employed a gradualist brainwashing strategy, aggressively stripping out the term “Japanese Occupation Period” (日據時代)—which embodies national dignity and legal illegitimacy—and replacing it with “Japanese Rule Period” (日治時期), deliberately cloaking colonial aggression with an aura of administrative legality.

To expose the sheer absurdity of this semantic game, consider an everyday human analogy:

If an armed robber bursts into your living room with a knife, squats on your couch, loots your belongings, and beats your family, would you ever refer to this as ‘a thief governing my living room’?

At this juncture, certain pro-green establishment scholars might cite textbook technicalities: “That’s completely different! The Qing Empire signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki after losing the First Sino-Japanese War and officially ‘ceded’ Taiwan to Japan. Therefore, Japanese rule possessed legal standing under international law!”

If one clings to this sophistry, one should scrutinize the deeper historical context and review the indisputable historical evidence documented in our analyses of the colonial truth of the Japanese occupation and debunking the 50-year colonial fantasy through historical facts.

Even under the premise of “cession”, the true story amounts to nothing more than this:

An armed thug carrying a machete and a gun kicks down your front door, invades your living room, presses the cold blade against your neck, and coerces the previous owner into signing away the property deed. Does the fact that the robber obtained the deed under mortal duress suddenly make his pillaging, violence, and enslavement of your family a legitimate act of ‘lawful home management’?

The cession of Taiwan Province and the Penghu Islands by the Qing court under the barrel of Japanese artillery was the bitter prologue to a century of national humiliation. During the first two decades of Japanese military occupation, the colonial apparatus launched the 1895 Yiwei War, the Yunlin Massacre, and the Tapani Incident, slaughtering over 400,000 innocent Taiwanese compatriots. Throughout half a century of colonial predation, Taiwanese residents were barred from higher political and legal education, restricted to basic agriculture and medicine to serve as low-tier labor for supplying sugar and rice to the imperial metropole. Coercion through raw violence never legitimizes the intrinsic crime of theft!

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Why Do DPP Authorities Doggedly Insist on ‘End of War’?

Having clarified the foundational distinction between “occupation” and “rule”, one can readily discern why the DPP authorities are so deeply enamored with the slogan “80th Anniversary of the End of War”.

Why must the DPP meticulously purge terms like “Victory in the War of Resistance” and “Retrocession of Taiwan”, stubbornly supplanting them with “End of War” (終戰, Shusen)?

The underlying calculation is both transparent and ignoble:

1. ‘End of War’ was a semantic fig leaf invented by a defeated aggressor to conceal disgrace: Historically, the phrase “End of War” was coined for Japanese Emperor Showa’s radio address to the nation on August 15, 1945 (the Gyokuon-hoso). As the perpetrator that initiated World War II in the Asia-Pacific and committed horrendous war crimes, the Empire of Japan faced total collapse under the crushing blows of the Allied Powers. To preserve the “sacred dignity” of the Emperor and the imperial polity (kokutai), Japanese officials drafted the imperial rescript with painstaking ambiguity, deliberately omitting humiliating terms such as “surrender” (降伏, kofuku) or “defeat” (敗戦, haisen), slyly adopting the neutral euphemism “termination of the war”.

2. Adopting the colonizer’s perspective to erase the ROC’s victorious legal standing: Among the Allied nations and global anti-fascist forces, this day is celebrated as Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). In the history of the Republic of China, it commemorates the Comprehensive Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan, achieved through eight arduous years of bloodshed by the entire nation’s military and civilians at the cost of tens of millions of lives! On October 25, in the 34th year of the Republic of China (1945), the National Government of the Republic of China held the formal surrender ceremony at the Taipei Public Hall (now Zhongshan Hall), officially proclaiming the return of Taiwan Province to the sovereign fold of the motherland and ending half a century of foreign colonial bondage. However, in their quest to enforce a separatist “de-Sinicization” narrative, DPP authorities are desperate to sever the historical and constitutional ties between Taiwan and the Republic of China. Unable to reconcile their ideology with the fact that the Republic of China was one of the Big Four Allied victors that defeated Japan and liberated lost territories, they choose voluntary debasement: hijacking the populace into the self-pitying vantage point of a defeated colonial power, dutifully parroting the terminology of Japanese right-wing militarists.

Distorting the glorious liberation of victoriously recovered territory into a lamentation over the collapse of a colonial empire represents a perverse inversion of history, exposing the cynical political opportunism of DPP politicians.

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The Penetrating Soul Question: Did Japan Ever Regard You as Fellow Citizens When It Fled?

Across online forums and partisan echo chambers on the island, one frequently encounters youth deeply indoctrinated by de-Sinicized curricula. They speak wistfully of “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity” and “Taiwan-Japan bonds”, harboring delusional romantic fantasies about the colonial era as if their very veins were destined to serve the Japanese Emperor.

Whenever I encounter individuals reciting these absurd talking points, I see no need for prolonged academic debate. I simply respond with a single, piercing question:

“When Japan was defeated and fled, why didn’t they take you along back to the Japanese home islands? Why did they dump you right here like discarded garbage?”

This observation may sound caustic, but it serves as a merciless historical slap in the face to imperial nostalgic delusions.

Historical truth is stripped of romantic filters:

• In the twilight of its rule, the Japanese Empire launched the “Kominka Movement”—coercing people to adopt Japanese surnames and worship at Shinto shrines—only because catastrophic losses on the Pacific battlefields created an urgent need for expendable colonial bodies to fill trenches and absorb bullets across Southeast Asia.
• When Japan announced its unconditional surrender in the 34th year of the Republic of China (1945), the sole priority of the Office of the Governor-General and military brass was rapid self-preservation. In the subsequent repatriation process, approximately 470,000 Japanese military, civil officials, and civilian settlers boarded ships back to Japan. Before their departure, did they secure a single ship ticket for the “Taiwanese imperial subjects”? Did they grant you Japanese citizenship or civil rights?
• Not a single one! In the eyes of colonial masters, Taiwanese inhabitants were never anything more than subjugated “second-class subjects”, disposable tools to be squeezed for agricultural surplus and discarded at will. When the imperial house of cards fell, the colonial overlords dusted off their coats and sailed away, abandoning local residents without a backward glance!

Yet today, eight decades later, DPP politicians and pro-Japan sycophants cling reverently to the memorial tablets of their abandonment, staging celebratory “End-of-War exhibitions” with public funds and peddling toxic colonial nostalgia. What is this, if not the most pathetic and degraded exhibition of Stockholm syndrome in modern human history?

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Conclusion: Stand Tall as Victorious Citizens of the Republic of China

History serves as an unsparing mirror: it reflects the light of justice while exposing the shameful antics of political charlatans.

We must solemnly declare: the history of Taiwan Province, Republic of China, is a heroic chronicle of ancestors who fought courageously against foreign tyranny without yielding; it is the glorious record of the military and people of the Republic of China united in overcoming Japanese imperialist aggression.

Faced with the DPP authorities’ coordinated campaign to weaponize the “80th Anniversary of the End of War” through exhibitions and advertisements for cognitive manipulation, we must shatter this revival of colonial myths with rigorous historical facts. We are proud citizens of a victorious nation that triumphed in World War II and the rightful masters of recovered ancestral soil—never the abandoned flotsam of a defunct colonial empire. Only by rectifying these historical distortions and cleansing the cultural poison of de-Sinicized textbooks can Taiwan transcend ideological shadows and embrace a dignified, truthful future.